ISHAN is an upcoming music artist from Melbourne who I met during college. The project was to make a hand drawn animation for a lyric video for his song called ‘Isabella’.
Listen to ISHAN's music on Spotify →Lyric Video
Design Process
Frame-by-Frame Animation
The character design was based on Ishan’s partner at the time, whom the song was dedicated to. We workshopped the design over a week, then progressed to the frame-by-frame walking animation. The hand-sketched-on-paper quality aligned with Ishan’s artist branding at the time.
To add more personified details to the video, there were three key loops on top of the walking animation.
1) On every second loop of walking, the character’s hair flicks behind her shoulder, as if windblown. 2) In the second verse of the lyric video, we added snowfall, to convey time and seasonal changes. 3) For the final line of the song, “I like you”, the character finally turns around to face the camera, seemingly acknowledging the singer.
Further Applications
A vertical version of the video was adapted to fit the format for posting on Instagram and TikTok. For Spotify canvas, we added a plain loop version of the animation in the vertical format, which made a great teaser for the lyric video.
Following the release of the song, Ishan made exclusive t-shirts using the typeface and character design.
